According to Jiemian News, Moonshot AI is in talks with all three cloud providers — Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — over a revenue-sharing arrangement for Kimi K3, with an opening offer as high as 30%. The talks are still at an early stage: how the revenue split would be calculated, when it would take effect, and where the service boundaries lie are all still undecided. All three cloud providers and Moonshot AI declined to comment.
The number 30% stands out because the industry had long treated 20% as the ceiling a model maker could realistically extract. If this round of talks closes, it would be the first large-scale model revenue-sharing agreement between a Chinese AI company and a major US cloud provider — until now, Chinese open models running on US clouds have mostly followed a pattern where the platform gets the weights for free and the model maker gets exposure, nothing more.
The weights are free — so what exactly is being split
Kimi K3 launched this July with 2.8 trillion total parameters and roughly 104 billion active parameters, making it the world's first open model at the 3-trillion-parameter scale. Being open source means anyone can download the weights and run them locally without paying a cent.
What's actually negotiable sits on a different layer: cloud providers package the model into a managed service (MaaS) and sell it to enterprise customers, billing by usage. That revenue has so far gone entirely to the cloud providers, and Moonshot AI now wants a cut of it. According to the report, cloud providers typically set a threshold of $20 million in annual revenue before a model even qualifies for a commercial licensing negotiation — models that don't clear that bar don't get a seat at the table at all.
30% happens to match the commission app stores charge developers. The difference is the direction of the flow: in an app store, the platform takes 30% from the developer; here, the model maker is asking the platform for 30%. Who holds the pricing power comes down to one question — how replaceable is this particular model.
Where the leverage comes from
Moonshot AI's negotiating leverage is written into its usage numbers. Huang Zhenxin, who heads Kimi's enterprise business, disclosed at the AWS China Summit that the company's API revenue has grown 400% year over year and now accounts for more than 70% of total revenue; overseas paying users have likewise grown 400%, spanning more than 180 countries and regions.
Annual recurring revenue has climbed even faster: $100 million in March, past $300 million by mid-June — tripling in three months. Ahead of K3's launch, nearly 3,700 developers were queued up to download it, and within 30 minutes of release its Hugging Face likes passed 4,000. In one tally as of July 26, Chinese models held roughly 63.5% of global share.
Do the rough math and even a 30% cut of a roughly $300 million revenue base wouldn't be enough on its own to reshape the competitive landscape. The real weight of this deal lies elsewhere: if even one cloud provider signs, the idea that Chinese open models can earn a cut of US cloud hosting revenue moves from hypothetical to precedent — and GLM, Qwen, and MiniMax would all have a contract to point to when they negotiate their own terms.
Sources: Jiemian News, CocoLoop, Hugging Face model page, public remarks at the AWS China Summit; figures on the revenue-share percentage, K3's parameter scale, ARR, and API growth rate were checked against public reporting.